Michelle Trachtenberg grew up speaking Russian, but when it came to playing Marina Oswald, the wife of Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, she turned to her mother for advice.
"I'm fluent in Russian, but I didn't grow up, luckily, with sentences like, 'You can't see your children. Hide the guns. Don't shoot the president!'," Trachtenberg explains. "That was not in my repertoire as a six year old."
Fortunately, Trachtenberg's Russian-born mother, Lana, was there to help, even earning a credit as a consultant for the film.
My mom "translated the entire script for me," she said. "We wrote it out phonetically, so that I knew the exact pronunciations. I had to change it to a housewife in the late 1950s."
Killing Kennedy, starring Rob Lowe as the ill-fated president, Ginnifer Goodwin as Jacqueline Kennedy, and Will Rothhaar as Lee Harvey Oswald, will premiere on National Geographic Channel on Sunday.
